As will be apparent to one skilled in the art of network design and management, configuration elements within the devices forming the network must be provisioned and managed if the network is to function properly.
One known way to provision elements within a network device is on an element-by-element basis, where each provisioning element represents the configuration datum for a specific local entity within the device (e.g., an interface, or service, or protocol). This approach is very time consuming, however, and requires many interactions between an external provisioning agent (i.e. operational support system or human operator) and the network device's configuration management system. Such methods of provisioning are particularly impractical for devices in which there can be hundreds of thousands of elements.
Furthermore, provisioning many instances of the same type of element is not uncommon when configuring a network device. Moreover, many of the configuration elements may operate in accordance with default values, which are pre-determined for the network. However, in order to update all of these configuration elements when a default value is updated is quite time consuming.
One prior art method of creating configuration elements is disclosed in co-owned pending application Ser. No. 11/237,728 entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVISIONING AND MANAGING CONFIGURATION ELEMENTS, which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Some prior art systems rely on using template systems, however, in order for specific configuration elements to be templated, they must be completely modeled as the templates do not re-use an existing model of a configuration element. This requires extra processing time to perform. Furthermore, the configuration values, which are based on existing templates, do not include sufficient information to allow differentiating between template default values and user provided values.
Other solutions, in an off-network EMS or OSS based solution, are also known but suffer from various problems such as that they require that the specific configuration elements being templated must also be modeled; the scalability of the solution is limited by the performance of the off-network system; the reliability based on off-network poll of all configuration elements followed by a push results in a slower response to configuration element recovery; write authorization is required on the OSS for all configuration elements; and since the target is a slave, autonomous decisions are not possible.
It is, therefore, desirable to provide a novel method of creating and updating configuration elements from a configuration element, which is a template instance.